A Review of The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris

I recently read The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris. Originally published in 2007, he republished a “not revised” but expanded and updated version in 2009 because he thought the world had changed so much between 2007 and 2009 after the banking crash of 2008. I’ve read the book 15 years later, in 2024, and it is very funny to see how he couldn’t even imagine how much the world would actually change. What’s fascinating is the ideas he proposes and how they vary in the world of smartphones and cloud computing.

Where We Work

I started working remotely during Covid, the great remote work wave, and I don’t expect to ever go back to an office full-time. The remote work world of today was likely unimaningble in 2008, given people’s reactions that Ferris loves to quote in his book, as well as due to the state of technology at the time. Ferris takes an obviously Machiavellian approach to remote work. He writes in Chapter 12, Disappearing Act aka How To Escape The Office, instructions on how to negotiate remote work with your boss (remember, this is in the era where everyone was still in an office full-time). His specific instructions are to lie about being sick (so you get a paid day off), and then secretly work remote to prove to your boss that you can be effective working from home. He doubles down on this deception-based concept by saying that once your boss agrees to let you work from home, to make sure your work-from-home days are more productive and your in-office days less so. However, I don’t think Ferriss was ever actually advocating for people working “from home”, his idea of remote work is to immediately get on a plane around the world.

However, I do find that working “from home” doesn’t actually work for me because I’m incabable of ignoring dirty dishes in my kitchen and I crave social interaction. Thankfully, these aren’t issues for my partner who does work from our home full-time. A primary difference, besisdes his indiffernce towards out-of-place items, is that he’ll leave the house when the work day is done. He’ll go on a run, go to a bar, meet with a friend for dinner or recreational sports. On the days I work from home, I rarely leave the house. My perfect middle ground is that I work full time from a local coworking space. It’s a 10 minute walk from our house (don’t even get me started on walkable cities vs living in the suburbs), so it’s by far the most economical commute ever. I get to see the same people every day and form close social bonds, while also having a sense of novelty from the turnover of new people and their ideas. No one judges when I actually get to the office, or what I’m wearing that day. It’s markedly different from the feeling that your boss is just ever-so-slightly (or even explicitly, with worse bosses), clocking what time you came in and making sure you stay late enough to get your 8 hours in.

I have flexibility – I’m continuing this writing train of thought, even as it cuts into 9 am “work time”. However, my version of remote work is still different from some people’s ideal in that I generally do most of my work between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm, and most of my team is in the same time zone as me. Some peoples ideal version of remote work, and I”m sure Ferriss would be in the same camp, would be to say it’s so much easier and quicker to fit 8 hours of a workday into 4 separate hours, say from 6-10 pm, or 10pm – 2am for the true night-owl. I think there’s some validity to that, but not because they’re so efficient – it’s because yeah, it’s a lot easier to knock out a lot of work when no one else is online and emailing or pinging you constantly with questions. Futhermore, working just some hours while in a drastically different time zone from your team is, I’m sure, just as effective at elimiating (necessary, business-related) distractions.

One of the largest remote work debates today is on collaboration. Bosses of large corporations keep saying that you have to be in person to foster creativity and innovation through collaboration. Propoents of remote work today say that collaboration can be effectively achiveved without being in person with your team, but some of this is lost if you’re not working at least some of the same hours as your team.

How We Work

It’s easy to see how smart phones can drastiaclly change the impact on Ferriss’s approach to remote work. It is hilarious to see that this this book was published during the sweet moment in time where business people had Blackberries with email on them, while the rest of us peasants still had flip phones. Nothing made me laugh harder than Ferriss’s ancient terminology when he advises “Do not carry a cell phone or Crackberry 24/7”. (This is referenced his index under ther term Blackberry. For some reason the term Crackberry isn’t in the index.) Before I walk to my coworking space each morning, since it feels like I’m running late every day, I’ll check my messages and calendar on my phone real quick to make sure I haven’t missed anything urgent or forgotten an early morning meeting request, which I could always take from my house before going into work.

What might be less commonly known, but is far more striking to me are the advances in remote work technology via cloud computing and improvements in data security. At the end of the chapter on negotiationg remote work, Ferris puts a link to some article saying how some bosses might have concerns about security with remote work, so you should do research ahead of time to defend against those concerns. I can’t imagine why they might think that, considering earlier in the chapter Ferriss advises that you should secretly install GoToMyPC on your work desktop so you can access it from anywhere. This is in fact the defintion of a security risk. For Ferriss, it’s a tool that also allows him to travel without a laptop since can login to his work desktop from anywhere in the world. I assume his laptop weighted 20 pounds which was in fact a good reason to leave it at home. I highly doubt these were secured VPN style connections, he was just granting internet cafes around the world back door access to a desktop computer sitting in his office, on the same network as every other desktop in the office. VPN’s are useful tool, one that he never mentions, but that I remember using in 2013 to access Facebook from China as college student, and in 2008 to get access to Facebook from the high school computers that blocked access. What can I say, Facebook had a stronghold on us adolecent millennails that firewalls couldn’t contain.

FYI – I typed his link in and it didnt work, but was actually able to locate the original press release from Cisco in 2008.

Cloud computing on the other hand, has truly revolutionzed remote work. I can be messaging my boss from our respective work places from the day and both be working in the same version of the same excel file. Ferriss toutes the usefulness of Skype, which managed to go from the Kleenex equilavent of a brand name to an obsolte software in the age of Zoom. Microsoft remains the domiant office software. My current company uses the Microsoft 365 cloud option, including Teams. This enables me to set meetings with anyone in my company, based on their calendar’s availability, and invite for the call is the link for the call. I get frustrated when scheudling calls with outside consultants that I can’t also see thier calendar details.

Some work places use slack for messaging instead or might use Zoom for their meetings. The rare outlier might use the Google Suite of produts (G Suite is apparently alread an outdated term, they’ve rebraded as simply Google Workplace). The decrease in security risk is nowhere as evident as it is in healthcare. Healthcare has strick regulations on PHI, patient health information. The relaxed regulations during Covid that allowed for Telehealth have adopted for a post-pandemic world, allowing most healthcare calls to continue a remote option – unless you need vacciation shots.

How to be an Influencer

Ferriss was writing this book during the golden age of blogging. He travelled and made money from his travel blog, in a similar vain to an old idol of mine, Chris Guillebeau. It’s an early version of the content creator, the now pervasive idea that anyone can simply travel and make a living by sharing the details of their travel life with other, less fortunate souls stuck inside offices in their boring homes. I think with anything easily earned, it is easily lost. I’ve seen influencers cry when their accounts got banned or deleted for some irrocavble reason, the truth being that if you don’t have clout outside of social media, you don’t really have clout. The best proof I can point to of this is the day Jennifer Aniston finally made an Instagram account. She wasn’t ‘building a following’, she broke Instagram because every account in existence tried to follow her at once. As of this morning, she has 44.7 MILLION followers.

For as much as I disliked this book, it clearly made me think about some things in a new light. I read this book mostly because it’s remained one of the most popular business books, for a now obvious reason. It reads like a get quick rich scheme for building your life base on only travel! Ferriss says you don’t need a lot of money to travel, but he only began to do so after building a successfully automated business. He’s now a well established writer with multiple NYT best sellers, which I’m sure futher enables his ability to work from literally anywhere, for very little time per week.

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